How to Share Your Tweets at Optimal Times: Followerwonk and Buffer Team Up

Ever since I’ve started blogging about topics on social media and especially Twitter, one of the questions that I have by far heard the most often is the following:

“When is the best time to Tweet for me to reach more followers?”

A lot of this requires a lot of data-analysis and whilst a ton of tools exist out there, they aren’t always terribly accurate. That’s why we’ve come up with this:

We couldn’t be any more excited to have teamed up with the folks from Followerwonk, an amazing Twitter analytics tool, to deliver the best times to Tweet for you. And from there, you can easily export your optimal Tweeting times straight into Buffer.

All that’s left thereafter is for you to find great article, links and more, add it to your Buffer and you are good to share at the best times to reach most of your audience.

Let’s dig in and see how we can get you all setup.

Find your best time to Tweet and Tweet at these optimal times

The first, and most obvious way to find out about the best times to Tweet is to simply head to the FollowerWonk homepage and hit “Analyze Followers”.

Step 1 – Analyze your optimal Tweeting time with Followerwonk

From there, simply add your own Twitter handle into the box and choose “analyze their followers” to get optimal Tweeting times:

Now, you’ll get a beautiful graph from FollowerWonk showing you exactly when most of your followers will be online.

All you have to do is select how many times a day you want to have setup for Tweeting and hit “Schedule at Buffer”:

Voilà – you are now extra awesome when sharing on Twitter by always hitting your followers feed when they are most active.

Other optimal Tweeting times to explore with FollowerWonk and Buffer

When we were brainstorming for this integration, the most obvious way to get your best times to Tweet for me were to simply look at when your followers are online.

Peter Bray, the founder of FollowerWonk and overall super smart guy, however, had some amazing other ideas, that we can look at to find the best time to Tweet.

Optimal time to share when most of your friends are online

Sometimes, you might not care so much about the people that follow you, but much more about the people that you are following, as they are likely also following you back and most engaged with you:

Optimal time when followers or friends from someone influential are online

Another idea we talked about is that sometimes, your following might be not large enough to get meaningful, optimal Tweeting time. In my case for example, I have a few smaller Twitter accounts with just a few dozen followers, the data from these might not be very beneficial.

So instead, I could pick someone really knowledgeable in the space, say for social media for example, and choose Jay Baer. Finding the people he follows and when they are most active, might be a great proxy for me too:

These are just a few ideas of how we realized could be very powerful to use for your optimal Tweeting times. At the end of the day, simply looking at your Buffer analytics for all the Tweets to make sure the timings work for you is key.

Over to you now. What do you think of the new FollowerWonk + Buffer collaboration. Give it a try and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Hi Johnny, thanks a bunch for the heads up on this – I’ve just spoken with Followerwonk and Peter is actively investigating. I’ll keep you posted, hope we can have that resolved asap for you.

Peter

Should be all good now! If not, please feel free to reach out to me directly on Twitter (@petebray)!

LeoWid

thanks Peter! Let us know if it works now for you @9ba1b3a15f247d5cf0e6e2239466567b:disqus 🙂

Robbie Williford

This feature is so cool! Very excited to see Buffer continue to grow and become a force to be reckoned with, all the while providing great customer service and awesome services.

LeoWid

Hi Robbie, thanks so much for the kind words! We’ve got some awesome more things in the pipeline too.

I hope this makes Tweeting at optimal timing much easier!

Matthew Freckelton

I’ve reset mine, let’s see what happens. No posting till 11am. Although I can see the advantage of integrating another app to provide the service. But surely having your own inbuilt one would have made the process faster rather then having to go through a separate service.

LeoWid

Hi Matthew,

Awesome, so great to see you are all good to go, keep us posted how things work out!

Great point, so overall, we take the approach that there are a lot of people with great expertise out there. In Buffers case, we try to focus really on making posting seamless – and we’ve got a long way to go for that.

In Followerwonk’s case, these guys are geniuses when it comes to analytics. So we thought that instead of us doing it all, we want to leverage their expertise.

That’s what we are thinking overall for Buffer. With about 50 integrations so far (check them out here http://bufferapp.com/extras) we want to team up with the best people out there to use our API and come up with something awesome together! 🙂

Matthew Freckelton

thought you might say that Leo. yeah makes complete sense to do it that way, integrating with other apps provides a natural and easy reach into their networks for buffer to expand into and become the default sharing app.

Wayne

Nice, Does not seem as comprehensive as Tweriods integration with Buffer tho? Leo, are you recommending one over the other?

LeoWid

Hi Wayne,

That’s a great question, I think it’s a tough call between the two and ultimately I think only your results can decide. My gut would be to try out both timing optimisations and see which one works better for you. And if you do! Please let us know the results, it might be an interesting article! 🙂

Yeah I used FollowerWont on my @gearlive Twitter account, synced it to Buffer, and it added the times to my personal @AndruEdwards account instead.

peter

Hi Andru: Can you email me at pb (at) moz dot com if you’re still having this issue? One thing to keep in mind is that if you do a report on a different user, you need to swap the “focus” of the account in the upper right hand corner. Peter

Hi Leo. This is great news for Buffer and just further example of the phenomenal growth of this incredible app! I did the check, and like Tweriod, I found that the times my followers are online are all over the place. So for me (with less followers) it just helps me see that it doesn’t really matter too much as to when I tweet, as the graph of activity is pretty flat right the way through. This is also because my followers are from all over the world. I am sure it will be more helpful when I have more followers! Well done again, though!

I love the report you get with FollowerWonk- very interesting. However I was really disappointed when I realised the graph is for all days of the week. That is not very helpful for power users because there needs to be a different schedule at the weekend to the rest of the week. I also find that each day of the week is different- that Wednesday gets a lot more engagement. I was hoping that FollowerWonk would analyse each weekday. Tweriod does that, but I find it a bit clunky- if only FollowerWonk gave us the option of having different times for each day of the week.

It is definitely useful that FollowerWonk allows us to see the best time of the people we follow and not just our followers, but when you start to follow lots of accounts (10,000+) it starts to become a little meaningless. I like to follow a lot of people and I use Twitter lists to zoom into the people I want to engage with regularly as well as zoom out to view all of the tweets. However, how about posting at the times the the people I actually want to reach are most likely to be on Twitter? For me that could be all the people in one of my lists, potential customers, current clients, people I engage with regularly. If a tool existed to do that- it would be amazing.

I think the tool that could do that would be Commun.it- they have all the data on our relationships.

Awesome Post!! Social media plays important role in website promotions.

Gijs Molsbergen

I believe the question shouldn’t be when to reach the ‘most’ followers, but the ‘right’ followers. I could reach a million in the US, while my Tweet might be way more effective for an Australian audience for example. What do you think?

LeoWid

Hi Gijs,

Thanks for stopping by here and yes, I think you are absolutely right. That’s why it might be a good idea to instead of looking at your own followers and when they are online the most, to pick, say a strong australian brand for example and then export the optimal times to Buffer from them.

Because I have international clients, I tweet to accommodate the time zone differences.

Patricia

I did it, and it wasn’t as great as I thought. Although over 16k followers it was pretty much spread out over the day. When I then clicked on ‘schedule’ at Buffer, it only gave me pm times, some of which were completely outside of the ‘good’ times to tweet.

This is very useful, thanks. I think I’ll alternate between FollowerWonk and SocialBro to stop my tweeting times from becoming predictable!

sourabh bajaj

Tried analyzing with 2-3 twitter handles, the optimal time it shows is pretty much through out the day. I think this thing is trying to make analyzing easier then it can ever be. Useful but can not depend completely on this.

Over the last few months, we launched a ton of new integrations for you to use Buffer with other tools, such as Feedly, Followerwonk and lots of others. One of the most important ways to use Buffer was still something that was very hard to do: Directly schedule Tweets and retweets via Buffer inside a […]